The Last September: A Novel by Nina de Gramont

Author:Nina de Gramont [de Gramont, Nina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2015-09-14T22:00:00+00:00

9

Someone must have told us how much work a restaurant required. Not to mention a new baby. In that muggy, exhausted summer, I often wondered why we didn’t listen. The Sun Also Rises opened in the throes of my sleepless nights and bleary days. Charlie would disappear midmorning and not come home till almost midnight. Every afternoon before service started, I walked downtown to eat dinner. Charlie would bring two plates of his favorite special to the table and sit down to eat with us, ignoring whatever crises arose in the kitchen until someone came to get him. When Sarah woke up and squalled, I had to walk her around the room while irritated waitresses set tables and polished glasses. Usually I ended up back at the table, trying to nurse Sarah and eat at the same time. Which made it kind of odd that Deirdre liked to join us for her shift meal.

“It’s nice,” she told me, “that Charlie lets us eat off the menu.”

I nodded, but this was news to me, and I wondered how much it was costing. If I suggested to Charlie making a pot of pasta for his crew, he would just smile. Where would the fun be in that?

Deirdre picked at her food, usually wasting more than half. There was a gleam behind her pale eyes as if her thyroid function ran a little too high.

“He’s so generous,” she said. “Not like my boyfriend. You wouldn’t believe how stingy he is.”

“The same guy we met at the gallery? He seemed very nice.”

“Oh, he’s nice. Just don’t ever try to get him to pay for anything. He got mad at me for drinking his beer. So I said I’d put a jar on the counter and put a dollar in it every time I drank one. I thought that would embarrass him. But he thought it was a great idea. Now every time I have a beer at my boyfriend’s house, I have to put a dollar in the jar.”

There was a pause, her fork in the air, her pale eyes focused intently on me. Deirdre owned the kind of good looks I recognized but did not appreciate. To me, she looked hard, too sculpted. I didn’t know if I was supposed to exclaim over the awfulness of her boyfriend or offer a commiserating complaint about Charlie. Luckily he came out of the kitchen just then, a dishrag over his shoulder. He never wore an apron, so his T-shirt and jeans were splattered with food. Sarah had fallen asleep in my lap. When Charlie sat down, I transferred her to him very carefully and finished my dinner, wishing Deirdre would find something to do so that we could have this, just a little bit of family time out of the day.

“Can you say something to her?” I asked toward the end of August, with the beginning of school looming and me fully versed in the pitfalls of Deirdre’s relationship. Our downstairs neighbor, an undergrad named

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